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Started with a PCjr (haah), upgraded to an SE, then a Performa, then another, a G4, and a MacBook Pro that I'm posting from. Also Win 3.1 through 7, NextStep 3.3, Rhapsody DR2, BeOS 5, Haiku, and a few other odds and ends in VMWare.
44.080/46.233/48.631/1.866 ms from NYC on TW.
It's LTE so it should theoretically be global. Slide-out keyboard and all the other bells and whistles...1.2GHz dual-core A9, 1GB RAM, microSD slot. Slightly lower-res screen (4" 960x540, still entirely reasonable) but other than that it's entirely adequate. Runs 4.1 stock, I'm sure Cyanogen or AOSP is up to date though.
With a 22-250 stuffed with 40-grain bullets@4200 fps. I had the drive set up at 25 yards, facing me - I aimed for the spindle, and by sheer luck hit it dead-on. At that speed, the thing literally detonated; the covers were intact but bulged, outside of that there was nothing left bigger than my fingernail...even the frame. Possibly the most satisfying act of destruction I've ever carried out.
The researchers freezing the phone weren't doing it for anything as trivial as a root exploit; they were doing it to break the filesystem encryption. Freezing the phone (with it switched on) slows down the RAM decay enough so that quickly (~0.5sec) popping out the battery will reboot the system without the RAM erasing. From there, they start the phone up into "fastboot" mode, which is a pre-OS state that allows the device to be attached to a computer and have a custom OS loaded. That OS sniffs the RAM for the keys that had to be stored while the phone was on and decrypted, bippity boppity bacon you have access to the AES-scrambled filesystem. It's a nontrivial exploit and also nothing new, low-temperature data remanence is a known weakness of cryptosystems in general.
Sennheiser HD280 Pros. No fancy bells and whistles, no big-name musicians attaching their names, and especially a dead-flat frequency curve so you get out of them exactly what you put into them - they don't have some "inherent warmth" but if you play with your EQ you can make them sound however you damn well please. There's a reason they're in just about every recording studio on Earth.
I was working at Brookhaven with a fancy-pants laser-driven time-of-flight mass spectrometer. We needed (ideally sub-)nanosecond resolution with as close to zero variability as possible (at that point you need to account for things like cable length to the cm and "refraction" across connectors). The kind of technical minutiae that gives audiophiles hard-ons and makes One Billion Dollars for the cable companies.
We used...high-quality oxygen-free copper cables with gold-plated BNC connectors. Certainly not the $5.99 bargain bin from Staples, but we were paying ~65 for a one-meter stretch. It's not like I was dumb enough to fall for Monster's schtick before that, but it made the point in a way I don't think anything else quite ever could.
The minimum legal length in the US is sixteen inches. That being said, the ATF generally considers it "constructive intent" if you have the parts to make an illegal weapon and ONLY an illegal weapon. It's been officially clarified that having a Thompson Contender interchangeable-barrel handgun, a rifle stock for the TC, AND a legal-length barrel is not constructive intent - while you could make a short-barreled rifle by putting the stock on TC, the long barrel justifies owning the stock. Same goes for AR pistols, if you have an AR pistol and an AR stock but no full-sized AR rifle, you're gonna be in some pretty serious poop. If you do have a rifle though, you're fine.
It is legally grey and I'm sure the ATF has played fast and loose with it before, but AFAIK it isn't a huge problem.
Ligher and far more forgiving. I've seen one Sammy, a Galaxy Note, with a cracked screen...and it seems every third iPhone is shattered. My broke-ass friend got a 4 when they went up for free, put in in a OTTERBOX, and promptly dropped and broke it. We're both technically savvy dudes and decided that the undeniably beautiful seamless metal and glass construction, while aesthetically incomparable, is utter shite at absorbing shock - phone goes down, lands on a corner, frame transfers energy to glass, CRUNCH. My S3 has hit the ground many times, hell, I slipped and literally flung it to the sidewalk once...nary a scratch, and it just has a silicone skin and screen film.
I have two contracts with Verizon that roll over a year apart; I need both lines for the foreseeable future and don't plan on switching carriers (I go to deep deep Louisiana and Maine, NO other service out there). I have a less-than-year-old S3 that has been in a rubber-baby-buggy-bumper and screen protector since day 1, absolutely mint condition; I can unload it on ebay and get an S4 on contract while quite possibly putting money in my pocket. Been at it for four years, it's really not a bad gig if you can swing it.
Dogfights IMO are visual-range bar-brawlin' GUNFIGHTS. Hell, even with Sidewinders in SE Asia they had to retrofit the Phantoms with cannon pods; when your ROE is eyeballs-on-the-bogey, you're too close in for anything else.
The point of the whole secure-comms thing as I understand it is to have one 22 staying well out of range of the hostiles with its targeting radar active (which totally screams HI GUYS HERE I AM LOOK AT ME YAAAAAAAAAAH!), feeding the info unidirectionally to a few more Raptors that are much closer and have all their radio and radar emitters quiet; they receive the data, feed it to their tracking and targeting systems, and fire all without (theoretically) compromising their stealthiness - the bad guys see one fighter 150 miles away and think "ha ha dumbass is lighting us up from out there!" and next thing they know six AMRAAMS appear out of thin air 20 miles away.
Yes, the latest and greatest zEnterprise mainframe will likely run your 1969 payroll software unmodified, or at worst with just a bit of (well-documented) work. I'm sure there are loads of features that have been added since the 360 days, but deep down inside those 5.5GHz processors beats an old, transistorized heart.
I'm getting a price for GOOG of $785. That's $2,512,000,000 of literal cash under the mattress. IT's not that GOOG is a particularly risky stock, but money in the bank is more or less zero-risk; putting enough away to live like a king for the rest of your days certainly seems to me the absolutely perfect retirement strategy.
RMS is The Man behind Hurd; it's as much a single-origin project as is Linux - and if he did as much work, and were as effective a leader/manager generally, as Linus, Hurd would probably be the bleeding-edge OS right now.
But he'd rather yell half-nonsense about Freedom Über Alles and eat his toe jam. Just sayin'.
My haircut is totally traditional!